Wheat Salad – Meh, Oven-Fried Chicken – Thumbs Up!

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 30, 2010

It’s nectarine season! I know Spring/Summer has finally come to Vancouver when I can head to the little fruit and veggie stores near me and see one of my favorite fruits amid all the usual apples and oranges.

Sure, I could probably get nectarines or their fuzzy cousins, the peach, year round at the big chain grocery stores, but the little, less expensive stores within walking distance only get them when they’re in season. They’re so much better in season – I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s because they can be picked a little closer to ripe since they don’t have to be shipped so far. The ones that get boated up from South America in the dead of winter are hard as rocks still and never do ripen up very well.

In honor of the lovely nectarine season, I tried the Cracked Wheat Salad with Nectarines, Parsley and Pistachios recipe for my June Culinary Adventure with Cooking Light.

It sounded like a pretty simple side dish, and I was intrigued that it included fresh dill and parsley. I hadn’t used either herb in a recipe before. To me, parsley has always been that sprig of green on the side of a dish in a restaurant.

I was right in how easy it was to make. The only thing you have to cook is water, and that’s just to boil it and then let the wheat soak in it. Everything else is prep-work of chopping up herbs and nectarines. Simplicity isn’t quite enough though to make me want to make something again.

This dish was missing something – and not something I forgot to put in. I went over the recipe a few times to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. All it had for dressing to add flavor with the herbs were olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I’m not sure bland is the right word for a dish with dill and vinegar in it, but that’s the best word I can come up with for it. The mix of flavors wasn’t quite right. If you got a lot of nectarine in your bit of salad, it was better, but overall it wasn’t anything special.

I don’t think I’ll be making that one again unless I can figure out what special ingredient it needs to make it better.

On a positive note, the recipe called for one tablespoon fresh dill and the smallest amount of dill I could find to buy was plenty more than that. I decided to use some of it to make some refrigerator pickles. I found a recipe online that I used as a guideline for the amounts of vinegar and sugar to use in it, then I put in the dill, garlic, onion and some jalapenos with my sliced cucumber. That was waaaaaay better than my cracked wheat salad.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to duplicate it since I didn’t pay attention to the amounts that I added aside from the vinegar and sugar, but man are they tasty.

I also didn’t want to end June on a negative Cooking Light review. So far the recipes have been really good, so it was disappointing to stumble on one I couldn’t rave about. The next one I tried was more of an “inspiration” or “guideline” for what I actually made.

The recipe was Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken. What I made was Pecan and Oregano Oven-Fried Chicken. Obviously I made a couple substitutions right off the bat – I didn’t have walnuts or rosemary. Then I used milk and honey Dijon salad dressing instead of buttermilk and Dijon mustard, and crushed cereal instead of Panko breadcrumbs.

So I guess the recipe was more of a guideline of the types of ingredients I needed to put together to get an oven-fried chicken with crunch and flavor.

The only issue I had with this one is that the bottom side of the chicken didn’t get crispy like the top side did. And I even put it on a wire rack like the recipe called for.

Otherwise, this one was a rousing success. The chicken stayed juicy and the crunch was ok, but the flavor was what really won me over on this one. It could have stayed soggy, and the mix of parmesan, oregano and the honey mustard would have still made this dish a winner.

I actually got my July issue of Cooking Light the other day and I’ve already got several recipes tagged to try. Stay tuned! There may be a lot of grillin’ and burger recipes coming up to check out.

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Tags: chicken, cooking light, nectarines, recipes

Blood in the Social Media Water

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 25, 2010

I’m jobless. That gives me a lot of time to surf the net and seek out job hunting advice. In the past year, I’ve probably seen a dozen or so articles about how people need to be careful about what they post on their social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The warning is, someone is going to see it. Your drunken photos; your posts about hating your boss; the “free” supplies you told the world about getting from the office.

It’s out there for the whole world to see, including potential employers. Even if you have your privacy settings set right, it’s still possible the supervisor or hr person at the company you want to work for is connected to you through a friend of a friend.

Luckily for me, most of my posts are about my boring life – like going grocery shopping. No everyone fares so well.

If there is any cautionary tale this week that best exemplifies why you need to be careful, it’s the Jennifer Wilbanks story. In case you don’t remember – it has been five years since she hit the news – Wilbanks was the runaway bride who faked her own kidnapping to avoid her wedding back in 2005.

So if I’m Jennifer Wilbanks, I’m thinking five years is plenty of time for people to forget about me. I can go about my business and post on Facebook about my life like any other normal person.

She had to have been feeling pretty safe that her five minutes of infamy were over, because she posted on Facebook about finding love.

How do I know this? Because someone in the “news” profession noticed and wrote a story about it that made it onto MSNBC’s online news page. I can’t even imagine how they got wind of it.

Is there someone in a newsroom out there whose job is to troll these social media sites looking for stuff like this? They’re like sharks, just waiting for that little drop of blood they can hone in on.

Or worse yet, could one of her own friends have tipped off the media?

Her friend Bob sees the post and turns to his cubicle mate at work and says, “You wanna hear something funny? I’m friends with that runaway bride chick and now she’s got a new man she says she’s in love with. She just posted about it online – I’ll believe it when she actually makes it down the aisle.”

Then Bob’s cubicle mate sends out an e-mail to his friends, and it circulates until it hits the desk of some news guy who finds a way to check it out on Facebook and write his little story. Then I write a little blog about it, because it’s just crazy that anybody even cares still.

So the moral is you’re never safe. Go ahead and post your crazy life updates and dramas, but be warned that you don’t know who out there is actually reading it. And be especially warned if you are or have ever been the subject of national/international news – they’re watching and waiting for you to do something stupid.

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Tags: privacy, social media

Review: Eat, Pray, Love

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 17, 2010

Generally I chose books like I choose the movies I watch; I look for entertainment value above all else. However, sometimes I stumble across a more artsy/enlightening/literary/soul searching book that catches my interest. This time it was Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert.

In a moment of weakness I was watching Julia Roberts on Oprah discussing the book and her experience starring in the movie. I’d never even heard of Eat, Pray, Love and here it was inspiring Julia Roberts, being talked about on Oprah and developing a small cult following.

The book is Gilbert’s search for life’s answers as she travels to Italy, India and Indonesia after her divorce. In as much as it is a spiritual journey, it is also a search to find out who she again.

The book is split into three sections, each with 36 chapters. There’s a significance to the way the book is structured and the number of chapters, but I’ll let you discover that for yourselves if you decide to pick it up and give it a read.

I didn’t dive into this book looking for answers, but I did find at least one idea or story that spoke to me out of each section.

The book begins in Italy, with some reflecting on how she ended up there divorced and learning Italian. This is the “Eat” part of the book where Gilbert lets herself experience all the pleasures that Italian food has to offer as she learns a language that will only be useful to her in Italy.

Chapter 21 is what spoke to me most in the Italy section. Gilbert writes:

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it. While I came to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not in my cultural paradigm.

The rest of the chapter recounts her discussion with Luca Spaghetti about how Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. We seek entertainment and amusement, but we don’t now how to enjoy doing something that has no bigger purpose than to bring us pleasure.

That was something I could completely understand her struggling with. I’ve been unemployed for a year now, and I’ve spent so much time finding ways to occupy my time and be useful, that I haven’t taken the time to actually enjoy not having that responsibility either. I’ve found ways to make good use of my joblessness, and we’ve t taken advantage of it to do some fun activities like camping and fishing, but I haven’t taken a day to just do nothing and enjoy it.

The “Pray” section takes us to India as Gilbert visits her guru’s Ashram. This section was the one I thought I’d least identify with, but there was one particular chapter that was a sort of “aha” moment for me.

India is where Gilbert really struggles with her internal demons – no surprise since all she does is meditate and pray when she’s not helping clean as part of her Ashram duties. All that time alone with your thoughts is like a golden highway to brooding.

In Chapter 50 she talks about how guilty she feels being in India on this spiritual journey and she’s still wrapped up in thoughts of her ex-boyfriend and why she couldn’t make that relationship work or her marriage work. Of all the deep things she could be thinking about and trying to figure out at this time, she’s stuck on such a “shallow” topic.

But then she remembers a story her psychologist friend told her. She had volunteered to counsel a group of Cambodian refugees, and though these people had experienced genocide, torture, murder, starvation and more, what they most wanted to talk about were relationship issues.

Gilbert writes:

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape.

I am just as prone to negative thoughts and brooding on actions and activities that have long since past. Now I know that I can just accept that those thoughts are a part of my human nature – accept them and let them go and don’t make it worse by beating myself up for having them.

In Indonesia, Gilbert finds love again. But it’s not her love story that I like from this section; it is a bit oflife lesson that she gets from Ketut.

In Chapter 87, Ketut talks about how he is able to use meditation that takes him “to up,” aka heaven. He also knows the meditation that takes him to hell. When Gilbert asks him what hell is like, he says it is the same as heaven.

Basically, the universe is a circle so the destination in the end is the same – it’s how you get there that makes the difference. You can choose to “go up” through happy places, or go down through sad places, but you’re going to end up at the same place in the end regardless.

Those are the top things I took from Eat, Pray, Love, but there are so many stories and so many different personal revelations that Gilbert has in her journey that the book will speak differently to people depending on where they’re at in their lives.

Throughout it all though, Gilbert’s writing is entertaining and she writes in a lighthearted way that allows you to find the humor in her journey as well as the lessons.

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Tags: book review, Eat Pray Love, review

Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 15, 2010

I can’t recall ever reading a Jane Austen novel. I’ve seen a few of the movies based on her books, but based on what I saw, I had no urge to read the books. At heart they seem to be basically Victorian era romance novels; however, you throw in some zombies, and I’m intrigued.

I had actually stopped at the bookstore the other day to pick up a different book, but in a moment of judging a book by its cover, I decided I had to give Pride And Prejudice And Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith a try.

I was curious how someone could incorporate zombies into a Jane Austen novel without treading too much on her own style of storytelling as well as her basic storyline.

Of course, since my experience with Jane Austen is through the movies based on her work, I can only rely on my impression of how the story measures up to those. And it measures up well. The wit and flirtation between characters is all still there, and that overall feel of the Victorian era sensibilities.

Basically what Seth Grahame-Smith seemed to do was ask how the story might be different if you introduce a plague of zombies into it as well. It’s not that they are suddenly besieged by zombies like a horror story, but instead “the plague” is something that has affected England for years and is something the characters have learned to deal with.

The Bennet sisters are all well trained in the “deadly arts” so they can serve the crown by killing zombies. Meanwhile, their mother is still concerned with marrying them off. Their social status is a stumbling block to them marrying well, plus Grahame-Smith adds the element of their decidedly unlady-like killing talents to that.

The result was more entertaining than I thought it would be. The addition of the zombie killing aspect is subtle – just a side quirk to a story that is still focused on the Bennet girls finding love – but Elizabeth’s thoughts as a result of being a well-trained zombie killer are a hilarious contradiction to what a proper lady should be thinking in that day and age.

What was a period romance novel is turned into a laugh-out-loud comedy instead. Jane Austen purists will be horrified, but if you want a light, entertaining twist to a classic, this one has my thumbs up.

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Tags: book review, Jane Austen, review, Seth Grahame-Smith

5k Runner in the House!

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 2, 2010

More than a month ago I signed myself and my husband up to do a 5k run. My plan was that if I signed up to do it, and paid money for it, then I’d have to stick to a plan for the next seven or eight weeks to get ready for it.

On Sunday, May 30, that plan came to fruition as I ran the PMC-Sierra Science Fair Fun Run. Best $35 I’ve ever donated to a cause since the result was that I actually stuck to a workout plan and met my goal of jogging the whole darn 5k. I won’t say yet that I’m a “runner” since I’m not sure there’s a big difference in speed between my power walking and my version of a jog.

I’m also pretty sure that real runners get some sort of enjoyment out of the act of running. I’m not sure there’s any point in my run when I feel like I’m enjoying it. I like the after affects – the weight loss, the ability to walk around or go up stairs without feeling completely wiped out – but the actual act of running pretty much feels like any other sort of exercising for me.

There is no joy in the act, only relief in the finish. And still, after 34 minutes of running, there is still no runner’s high.

So really, it’s quite an accomplishment of willpower to not only stick with training to run for several weeks but to then run 34 minutes straight to jog an entire 5k.

I’m not just giving it up now that I accomplished it though. According to my Couch to 5k program, I still need to finish up with two more 30 minute runs this week to complete the program.

Today I ran one of those in the pouring rain. Perhaps my biggest triumph isn’t running the 5k, but finding the willpower to stick with this thing even when it’s raining, or hot, or I just don’t feel like doing it.

I will need to find another motivator to keep me going too. Perhaps another 5k toward the end of summer. I’d like to think I can do a 10k next summer, and I’ll have more time to figure out what causes I might like to support when I do my run.

My husband made fun of me a little bit for choosing to run for ScienceFairsBC. He said something to the affect of there being starving children all over the world and disasters and whatnot, and I chose to support science fairs.

First of all, it was the first 5k run I found that was at a reasonable date for me to train for. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t mind that that’s what my money was going toward. Basically I’m supporting education, and extra education support in schools.

You can’t go wrong with educating kids. Maybe one of those kids will be inspired and be the person to cure cancer, or solve the world’s energy problems, or build a better mousetrap.Even better, find a way for people to be healthy and fit without needing to run all the time.

Now that’s a cause I can get behind.

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Tags: 5k fun run, fitness, health, jogging

May I Try Another Recipe Please?

Posted by Cynical Sarah on May 31, 2010

It’s the last day of May and I haven’t even told y’all about my culinary adventure from the latest issue of Cooking Light yet. In honor of the great weather we’ve been having and the possibility of barbecues in the near future, I tried a healthy potato salad recipe this month.

In my mind, potato salad is supposed to be a mayo and mustard concoction that’s served cold and can’t be left out too long or it will go bad. It sure does taste good, but perhaps a potato salad with less calories and less chance of food poisoning would be a nice change.

So my June 2010 issue of Cooking Light had all sorts of summer food options. (I’m  not sure what happened to the May 2010 issue. They seemed to have skipped one.) There were tips for cooking beef, articles on grilling, pan roasts and more, but I settled on reading the “4 Steps to Perfect Potato Salad” and then trying out the Farmers’ Market Potato Salad.

First of all, I read up on how to properly boil potatoes so that they don’t turn into a pile of mush in the salad, and then chose a recipe that uses roasted potatoes instead. Another good tip though was that you should add your dressing while your potatoes are still warm so they absorb maximum flavor.

That was easy enough to follow since the potato salad I chose to try was also served warm anyway. Really, it seems I chose a recipe that was the exact opposite of what my brain thinks a potato salad should be. It’s warm, and it has no mayo.

It also had things like corn, tomato and zucchini to make it even more foreign from a “real” potato salad. But it did have mustard. The dressing was made from olive oil, vinegar, tarragon (though I subbed in fennel seed instead), whole grain dijon mustard, tabasco sauce, salt and pepper.

So I roasted some potatoes and corn and drizzled the dressing on while it was warm like the tip page said. Once it was mixed up, the only sign there even was dressing was a few chunks of dijon here and there. My initial impression was that it was going to be a very disappointing salad compared to what my brain wanted it to be.

Then I added i the sauteed zucchini and onions, and tossed in the cut up cherry tomatoes. It pretty much looked like a plain bowl of roasted and sauteed veggies. But I guess that’s what you would expect if you’re not adding mayo to it.

So it all comes down to taste then. Will this potato salad taste good? Will it work just as well to serve at a picnic? Will Troy approve?

The answer was yes, yes and yes.

This was fairly simple to make, and the result was a lot tastier than you would expect without thick layers of dressing holding it all together. The vinegar and the Dijon mustard give it a good zing.

We ate it warm the first night right after making it. The recipe says you can make ahead of time and serve cold, but when I tried it cold the next day, I didn’t like it quite as much. I think the roasted potatoes and the sauteed veggies are better warm.

That’s the only recipe I got around to trying this month. At least it was a success. I’ll probably try out a couple more from it in June since I’m guessing I won’t be getting another issue until July anyway. There’s a Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken recipe that looks pretty delicious, and the Cracked Wheat Salad with Nectarines, Parsley and Pistachios looks interesting. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Tags: cooking light, diet, food, healthy eating, potato salad, recipe

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